de Sica, Vittorio

1902 - Born on July 7th in Sora, Latium, Italy. Italian movie director.

1923 - Made his screen debut while still in his teens, joining a stage company.

1940-1942 - He turned to directing, making comedies in a similar vein, but with his fifth film 'The Children Are Watching Us', he revealed hitherto unsuspected depths and an extraordinarily sensitive touch with actors, especially children.

1946-1948 - The first film he made with the writer Cesare Zavattini with whom he would subsequently make 'Shoeshine' and 'Bicycle Thieves', heartbreaking studies of poverty in postwar Italy which won special Oscars before the foreign film category was officially established.

1971-1973 - He made 'The Garden of the Finzi-Continis', a powerful study of anti-Semitism in Fascist Italy, which won him yet another Oscar, and his final film 'A Brief Vacation'.

1974 - Died after the removal of a cyst from his lungs on November 13th in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, Ile-de-France, France.